Return of the renaissance man
Tom Baxter's second album, Skybound, has just topped the Irish album chart. But it was a record that only got made after Baxter personally financed the sessions with his other talent of figurative art painting.
Peter Murphy, 21 Feb 2008
I’m a believer in the fact that we are products of nature, so depending on where we are and what time of year, you’re either an oak tree or an apple tree; you’re either a daffodil or an evergreen. I think the time of the year and what the cycle is of the earth in correspondence to the universe affects our personalities and the ways we act.”
Whew. There’s an opening statement and a half, delivered in response to my inquiry about Tom Baxter’s date of birth, October 29, 1973, and how it informs the song ‘Scorpio Boy’ from his first album Feather & Stone. Tom, I figured, must have had at least a passing acquaintance with astrology, astronomy, cosmology, or some other branch of the esoteric arts and sciences.
“Of course it can get silly at times reading the Sun’s horoscopes and nonsense like that,” he says, “but I do think there’s a poignancy about nature, or at least our involvement in nature, because if there wasn’t, then what is art? Even the Scorpio sign itself, the nature of the Scorpio myth, the animal – it can be quite forthright, visionary, strong, and can also manage to fuck up and sting itself.”
Presumably he’s heard the old fable about the scorpion and the frog?
“Remind me.”
A scorpion and a frog come to a stream. The scorpion asks the frog if he can cadge a piggyback ride across the water. The frog agrees on condition that the scorpion won’t sting him. The scorpion assures him he won’t, but halfway across the stream, he stings the frog anyway. The dying frog croaks, ‘Why’d you do that? Now we’re both screwed.’ The scorpion replies, ‘Because I’m a scorpion.’
Tom Baxter, thankfully, seems to have taken the high visionary road and is avoiding the pitfalls of self-sabotage. As we speak, his second album Skybound has just ascended to the top of the Irish album chart, bolstered by the single ‘Better’, a song destined to do for the Suffolk songwriter what ‘Babylon’ did for David Gray and ‘The Blower’s Daughter’ did for Damien Rice.
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